Does the world need another RSS reader/mousetrap? We already have so many.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rss+readers
What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new reader?
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=rss+readers
What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new reader?
If that's developing to offer (OP in particualrly said their friend would soon be offering a new service) an RSS Reader because there's something to actually innovate and more fully solve a problem, then it's great. Otherwise, it's just fodder for AdWords and Facebook when they eventually try to build acquisition for a business around it.
And we also have near-universal OPML import/export, so the cost of switching is minimised.
> What is your friend's idea to revolutionize with their new reader?
You don't need a revolution to make your app compelling, you just need to improve on status quo. RSS has a lot of shortcomings, most importantly discoverability.
Here's a simple idea: crowdsourced discovery. Users could opt-in to anonymously share their feed list (whole or parts); keyword-based categorisation could group them into topics; etc. The reader could use an algorithm (haha, we're coming full circle) to suggest interesting topics, feeds, posts. Honestly I'd be interested in something like <https://kagi.com/smallweb/>.
Extra kudos if the dataset is released publicly.